If I wanted to play a stock game in a single window, I'd have go through many steps. First, I'd perform a search, then click on the stock I wanted to trade. On Blog$hares, I'd then click the "Buy" link in the page that loaded, and then on the next page I'd click the buy button (assuming the amount to buy is correct). After going through three pages, I could then go back and perform the search again. I'd have to do this for each stock I wanted to make a buy in. Often, I'll have a page loaded of 100 stocks, and I'll make a buy in at least 80 of them. This process could swallow a large amount of time. As it can often take 3-4 buys to gather up all the available shares of one stock, 80 stocks could eat up hours.

Personally, I don't want to spend hours performing tedious tasks to play a game that isn't going to make me real world money. What if I could perform ten buys in the course of 1-2 minutes? That would surely speed up the gameplay, especially in the early phases of the game where buying extremely low and selling as high as possible is the name of the game?

Enter the Opera Web Browser. In Opera, I load my search window or appropriate list of stocks (I'll let the reader figure out how to find the lists, as I just don't want to compete for access to those stocks right now) and take a deep breath. I click the mouse roller/middle button on the link for each of the stocks in the list until I have 10-20 stocks loaded in the background. I can see the tabs for each page loaded across the bottom of the page. The default is to place the tabs at the top, but I configured mine for the bottom, which makes it feel like a taskbar.

Now that I've got 10-20 stock information pages loaded in the background, I have to click each tab on the taskbar, click "buy" and then the "buy" button on the page that loads, wait for the results page, and then close that window before moving to the next window and repeating. Still too much time. I must streamline further.

One of the great things about Opera is that it has a great keyboard interface. Many operations can be done using the keyboard, which can greatly speed webbrowsing. One keyboard sequence allows me to move from tab to tab quickly. Pressing 1 will move me one tab to the left, while 2 will let me move one tab to the right. By using my left hand to move window to window on the keyboard, I move the mouse that much less. This shaves a mere fraction of a second off of the time. I think we can do better.

If I can load all of these windows, why should I have to wait for one window to load before moving to the next window? The greatest time-waster of the whole process is page loading. I'll just let the pages load in the background, as I did when I opened them.

So, here I am with 20 pages loaded. I press 2 to go to the next tab, where I click the "buy" link. If the link is down a page, I press spacebar with my thumb before clicking "buy." After clicking, I press 2 again and repeat in the next window. I simply repeat this until I have clicked the "buy" link on each of the loaded pages. After the last page loads the purchase form page, I verify the amount of shares to buy and click the "buy" button. Then, I press 1 to go to the previous window and repeat. This goes all the way back to the first window again. Now, all I have to do is click the close window X (NOT the close application X, but the one nested inside it) until all the individual stock windows are closed.

Using this process, each stock purchase takes a very few seconds to perform. If one page doesn't load properly, I press F5 to reload the window, adding a couple seconds, but otherwise it goes very quickly.

Using this method, I can perform 80 stock buys, and then have a chance to do something else while I wait for the 20 minute purchase timeout to run out. For those not in the know, Blog$hares limits multiple purchases in a single stock to only one in a 20 minute period. This gives me chance for a bathroom break, get a drink, or to update my blog, between purchase runs.

While waiting for the next round of buys, I load my portfolio in shares view, sorted by the number of shares held by the public, largest number at the top. As each stock's purchase timeout ends, the stock will turn green. reload the page as the time arrives for the first batch to timeout, and start to work. As before, I middle-click on each stock that has turned green, until I have 10-20 loaded in the background. Then, it's 2 click, 2 click, 2 click through them all. Then it's 1 click 1 click 1 click through them again, and finally close all of the windows by clicking their X to close. This time, it's even faster, because I don't have to pay attention to each blog's share price and available shares, to be sure I want to buy it. If it's in my portfolio, I've already made that decision, and my sorting process verified the stock's availability. I reload the portfolio page and repeat this process until this round is finished.

The whole process of buying up 4000 shares in a stock takes one hour and 20 minutes at minimum. It's really more of an hour and a half, but using this method, that time is a combination of game play time and rest periods. I'm also doing dozens of purchases during that time. I have, in fact, done an 80+ stock purchase run while selling off a previous 80+ purchase run and STILL had time to read some blogs while I waited for Blog$hares to catch up with me.

There are a couple other tricks I like to use. One is to disable image loading, which can be done with a single click under Opera. I do this to stop the image ads from loading. This benefits for multiple reasons. One is that loading is much faster, and more reliable. Image ads can hang up the loading process on occasion, meaning I have to press F5 to reload the page. The second reason is to reduce load on the server. If 100 people used my technique to play blogshares at the same time, the number of pageloads could quickly begin to look like a DDOS attack on the server. The third reason is that my process isn't going to result in clickthroughs on those ads. I'm barely registering the existence of the ads, unless they hang my page. Loading, but not clicking on, the ads reduces the clickthrough rate for the ad, which is often an important statistic.

I'm also a karma-whore in the game. By voting on industries for the blogs I'm buying into, I can gain karma points. If I have the spare time, I'll go ahead and middle-click on the url for the blog itself. I check it out, and vote for industries. By easily loading into new windows, I don't get in the way of the buy/sell process. As the votes are approved, I gain karma points and chips. The resulting slowdown need only be a matter of 30 seconds or so. Usually, I do this while selling, or while buying the last few shares of a stock that are available, so as to not increase the timeout before buying more shares.

I hope that readers of this article will consider Opera as their browser of choice for playing Blog$hares. It really is a fantastic browser for the purpose. I doubt I'd play the game if I had to do it in IE, because of the absolute klunkiness of IE.

Before you go, there's another cool reason to use Opera. If you play Blog$hares, the chances are you read blogs. Opera has an fantastic feature for blogreaders that I found completely by accident. All browsers that I know of will page-down the current page when you press the spacebar. Opera takes this one step further for blogs. Blogs have a current page of articles, and most have a link at the bottom to go to the next page of articles. Opera detects this. When you reach the bottom of the page, and press spacebar, Opera will actually load the next page. Very cool.